THE INVITATION

FROM THE RACE WE CHOOSE: RUNNING TOWARD OURSELVES

There came a moment when I realized I had not spent an entire month at home in twelve years.

At first, it felt like a life and career I genuinely loved.

One that allowed me to move through the world, work with people, and witness life in all its complexity.

Airports.
Hotels.
Conversations.Constant movement.

The rhythm of an industry built around momentum, performance, responsibility, and the perpetual anticipation of what comes next.

For more than twenty years, my work in the financial industry placed me inside deeply personal conversations surrounding wealth, stewardship, uncertainty, transition, legacy, ambition, grief, and responsibility.

I sat with people during some of the most significant moments of their lives—moments of growth and collapse, celebration and loss, clarity and confusion.

I witnessed extraordinary success alongside a quiet loneliness.

And over time, I began to notice something beneath all of it.

Most people were not searching for more answers or information.

They were searching for orientation.

A moment of discernment.
An invitation to pause.

A place to think freely.
A place to ask difficult questions without judgment.

A place where dignity could remain intact while truth was explored.

When I stepped away from life as a wholesaler to create
Red Thread Consulting, it was not because I stopped valuing the work.

I simply wanted to live differently within it.

I wanted to create a space rooted in conversation, reflection, discernment, and intentional advocacy.

A quieter place where people could feel met without being sold, managed, or defined.

A place where listening itself still held value.

For many years, I have worn a simple red thread around my left wrist. Across cultures, the red thread carries many meanings. Protection. Fate. Connection. Destiny.

But for me, it became something far quieter.

A tether back to myself.

I knew that somewhere beneath the movement, the expectations, and the constant motion of achievement, there was still a quieter truth—a thread within the human experience waiting to be understood.

This book emerged from that threshold.

And unexpectedly, much of what clarified that threshold came through horses.

For the past seven years, I spent much of my time standing inside 12 x 12 stalls alongside retired and injured Thoroughbred racehorses.

In the stillness of those spaces—spaces most people would consider confining—I began to understand something about my own life.

Slowing down reveals what constant motion conceals.

The horses became mirrors in ways I still cannot fully explain. Their lives, shaped by performance, expectation, conditioning, physical demand, and human ambition, reflected aspects of myself I had never fully stopped long enough to examine.

Perhaps I am not so different from them.

And through our time together, I developed an even deeper reverence for both their journeys and my own.

The 12 x 12 Journey™ emerged from those quiet spaces—not as a program or prescription, but as a framework for reflection.

A way of exploring the inherited narratives, ambitions, identities, and definitions that shape a life, often long before we consciously choose them.

This book is not intended to tell you who to become.

It is not a manifesto for reinvention.
It is not a performance of certainty.

The essays ahead are intentionally spacious.

Reflective. At times indirect. They are written less to persuade than to create room—room for recognition, memory, discernment, and return.

My hope is not that you read these pages observing me through your eyes.

My hope is that somewhere within them, you begin hearing yourself more clearly.

Your own memories.
Your own questions.
Your own music.

Because the life we are searching for is not something entirely new.

It is the quiet return of something essential, waiting
beneath the noise and expectations.

Welcome.